Game Details

Put a few hundred hours into a game and you'll normally have its mechanics down pat. You may not be the greatest player ever, but you can usually expect to be at least competent and able to make a valuable contribution to your team's efforts. Sure, some teenager all hopped up on Mountain Dew and pubertal rage is still going to have faster reactions than you, but you'll get by.

Until you pick up Dota 2. In Dota 2 you can play for a hundred hours and still be the most useless n00b to ever play the game, a let down to your team, an embarrassment to friends and family. It's a brutal game. But if you get into it—and not everyone will—it can make a full-on heroin addiction look like nothing more severe than a mild hankering.

Staggered release

Although Dota 2 officially launched out of beta this week, Valve has stopped short of making it a free-for-all where new players will get slaughtered by beta veterans. The game is being rolled out through a staggered launch, both to ensure that the game isn't inundated with people who don't know what they're doing and also to ensure that the matchmaking and game servers can tolerate the influx of new players. You can sign up and Valve will e-mail you when you can start playing.

Before its "official" (though still limited, see sidebar) release this week, Dota 2 has been available for the last two years as an invitation-only beta, with beta keys randomly assigned to existing players. In this way, it grew organically as gamers gave keys to friends or sold them for inflated prices. Even with this limited availability and a learning curve that's almost horizontal (in that additional time doesn't actually gain you much additional skill), Dota 2 has become hugely popular. It's the biggest game on Steam, boasting more concurrent players than any other title on Valve's DRM and distribution platform, regularly breaking 300,000 concurrent players.

Enlarge/ Here my ridiculously overpowered Drow Ranger takes down Roshan single-handed. When he dies, he leaves behind the Aegis of Immortality, an item that resurrects you five seconds after you die.

What the heck is a MOBA?

Dota 2 is a game in a genre that has no good name. I'm going to go with "MOBA," standing for "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena," but "ARTS," for "action real time strategy" is not uncommon either. If you're not familiar with MOBAs, you're probably not alone.

Superficially, the basic MOBA setup is that of an RTS game: a top-down view of a play area, a minimap, two bases, and units that do battle, with the aim of defending their own base and destroying that of the enemy.

Know your Dota lineage

Dota 2 itself is a sort of official sequel to Defense of the Ancients, a modification to Warcraft 3. The original DotA was itself inspired by a StarCraft mod, called Aeon of Strife. DotA's mysterious and anonymous developer, known only as IceFrog, was employed by Valve to work on what is, in essence, a brand new version of the same game.

This time around, however, the game is a standalone, free-to-play title built using Valve's Source engine rather than as a mod to another game. The old mod is still being developed, but the two games are essentially being developed in parallel. Dota 2 looks an awful lot better, but DotA has a few extra heroes that are still awaiting their migration.

However, MOBAs turn RTS gameplay on its head. In a traditional RTS, you build a base, collect resources, build your army, and then attack. In a MOBA, there's no base building and no army. Instead of building, the bases are predefined—there's a large structure (the "ancient," in Dota 2 terminology) at the heart of your base, and a series of defensive towers along three different paths ("lanes") that join your base with the enemy's.

Instead of an army, you have heroes and creeps. Creeps are automated, computer-controlled units. They spawn every 30 seconds and march along the lanes from your base to the enemy. They fight any enemies they happen to meet along the way.

Heroes are where the player gets involved. Each side in Dota 2 has five heroes, picked from a pool of somewhere north of 100. Heroes have three attributes: strength, which governs the number of hitpoints and how fast they regenerate; intelligence, which governs the amount of mana you have and how fast it regenerates; and agility, which governs how fast you fire and how much armor you have.

Heroes can have short or long-range attacks and also have active or passive abilities that differentiate them from other players. Players can also buy items with in-game gold to get anything from regenerating health to unlocking faster movement to briefly turning enemy units into pigs.

Each individual game starts from scratch; abilities and items have to be earned through strong play in that very match. There are no persistent (non-cosmetic) unlocks or anything of that ilk; everyone in a game has the same selection of heroes available, the same set of abilities, and the same set of items. The only advantage that experienced players take into a game is their knowledge and expertise; their heroes work just the same as everyone else's.

It's also important to note that death isn't permanent in Dota 2. When your character dies, you lose some gold, your positioning, and up to 100 seconds of time while you wait for a respawn. This is precious time where your opponents continue to gain experience and gold for better abilities and items, though, so early deaths can really snowball into a worse position overall.

Heroes are broadly split into a number of nuanced classifications, but the major split is between "carry" heroes and "support" heroes. Carry heroes are pretty vulnerable early on, but they can carry their team late in the game if they get a chance to reach their higher levels and items. During the end game, these characters can lay down huge amounts of damage in a short space of time and often soak up a huge amount of damage too.

Support heroes are more powerful early on, but their usefulness tends to taper off as the game continues. They have abilities that can stun or slow enemies, making it easier for others to pile on the damage, and they can often heal allies or use magic-based attacks to score early kills.

In a typical 30- to 60-minute game, the first 10 to 15 minutes is spent predominantly in the lanes, accumulating XP and trying to get the last hits and bonus gold on enemy creeps. After that, there's a phase where support characters roam around trying to pick off enemy heroes while the carries build up their gold and buy their essential items. The final phase of a match is characterized by epic five-on-five team fights where the carries really get to show their worth, killing the other team and destroying their base.

The long road to mastery

Enlarge/ Here I take on 5 enemies all at once, because, well, YOLO. Or Leeroy Jenkins, as it used to be called.

Sounds relatively simple, right? So what makes it so hard to learn? The most significant challenge is probably in the diversity of the heroes. There are more than a hundred to choose from, and they all have differences past the obvious cosmetic ones (though the backstories and well-voice-acted personalities of each one are entertaining in their own right). While some abilities are found on several heroes—for example, there's more than one hero with a "silence" spell that prevents an enemy from casting abilities of their own—they are, for the most part, remarkably diverse and differentiated.

It takes a couple of games just to get the basic hang of a hero and his abilities, but mastering a hero—knowing both how and when to use his abilities and when and what items to get—can take dozens of games, especially for one of the more micro-management-intensive heroes. Different attack animations for each hero mean you'll have to practice the crucial timing to get that last, gold-producing hit on an enemy as well.

Beyond the hero differences, there's also a great deal of teamwork to learn. Certain heroes are particularly strong at initiating a fight. For example, Magnus the Magnetaur (imagine a centaur with the physique and head of a rhinoceros) can pull all the enemies in a radius around him together using his magnetic rhino horn, temporarily disabling them. This allows other heroes with area-of-effect abilities to attack effectively and to set up some big kills.

But pulling off this combo requires skill and timing. The Magnus player has to recognize the right opportunity and pull off a series of moves in quick succession. The rest of the team then has to spring into action to take advantage of Magnus' initiation at the right time.

Then there are more nuanced and less obvious quirks, like figuring out where to stand, knowing when you're vulnerable to being killed, knowing when it's safe to go in on the attack and when it isn't, and so on. The result is a game that's easy enough to learn, at least in a basic sense, but which takes a phenomenally long time to master.

Throughout the beta, this complexity has been Dota 2's biggest issue. It's a hard game to get in to, especially without a friend to show you the ropes. A bad player can ruin the game for the others on his team, and this leads to a certain amount of hostility. The match-making system is supposed to pit you against players of a comparable skill level, but there's only so much it can do.

In the last few weeks of the beta, Valve fleshed out a tutorial mode that leads players through the basics, first in some special tutorial maps, then through matches against bots through to matches against other humans. Just playing through the tutorial's five matches against bots and 10 against humans, you'll probably put in 8-10 hours alone. At that point, you'll have a good grounding in the game but still be left with plenty to learn.

But is it any good?

So is the game itself worth the aggravation and difficulty of learning its nuances? When I first started playing back in February, I wasn't convinced. I jumped in without knowing what was going on (there was no tutorial back then), but I was fortunate enough to immediately find some friendly players who could explain the basics of the game. I also picked Windrunner as my first hero; by chance, it turns out she's a good choice for new players.

For the first month or two, I wasn't really sure if I liked the game. That sounds a bit weird, and it is. On some level, I presumably must have enjoyed the game to even stick with it for months, but I was never completely enthused by it. I just found myself wanting to play one... more... game....

If that first experience had been worse—if I'd been matched against players who were less welcoming and more abusive—I might easily have turned my back on it and never played it beyond that first handful of matches. There is a system for reporting abusive players, and I get semi-regular notifications that people I've reported have been punished, which is good, but the environment can still be quite hostile.

Instead, however, I stuck with it and started to actively enjoy it. Finding a friendly crowd to play with was key to really getting excited by the gameplay. The mechanics of every game will be the same, but the range of heroes, items, and strategies makes for a tremendously varied, entertaining experience.

Not only do I enjoy playing Dota 2, I also enjoy watching it. It has a fledgling professional e-sport scene, with the third major Valve-sponsored tournament, The International 3, taking place this August. There are countless tutorials and videos online, with Purge's "Welcome to Dota: You suck" ranking as probably the best-known and widely used.

Is it actually a good game? I am still not entirely sure. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's endless frustration. Sometimes I have a game where it all comes together as it should, and it's fantastic. There are still plenty of things that surprise me, and still plenty of heroes that I'm completely useless with, even after hundreds of hours.

The competition

As the sort-of sequel to the original MOBA (see the lineage sidebar above) Dota 2 feels like the natural choice for players who want to get into the genre. However, it's certainly not the only one; Riot Games' free-to-play League of Legends, first released in 2009, has more players and a more developed e-sports scene than Dota 2 can currently boast. Which game is better is a matter for Internet flame wars. I haven't personally played League of Legends as I'm somewhat turned off by its more cartoonish graphical style and reports of a community that's even more hostile to newcomers than Dota 2's (though Riot is making efforts to fix this).

The basic concepts are the broadly the same, but the details differ. League of Legends, for example, lacks some DotA staples such as denying (killing injured, allied creeps to prevent enemies from getting their gold). It also doesn't provide immediate zero-cost access to all the heroes. Instead, you can play a rotating set of heroes for free or purchase permanent access to favored choices. On the other hand, it adds an extra dimension with persistent rewards, such that each game isn't started from a clean slate.

If you're willing to put in the time investment, either of these games (or other MOBAs like Heroes of Newerth) is worth picking up, especially for the price of "free." It's generally agreed that whichever MOBA you play first is the one you're going to prefer. Dota 2 is the first one I played, so it's clearly the best.

Verdict: Well, you can't actually buy it, because it's free to play. But you should definitely play it.

The Good

Deep, engaging gameplay.

Diverse cast of highly differentiated heroes.

Tidehunter and Kunkka trolling each other.

The Bad

Other players can be jerks.

There's a slim chance that League of Legends is better.

The Ugly

I have somehow spent more than 800 hours in this game since February, which is utterly insane.

No thanks. I have no interest in a "game" that I need to get a degree in to play. Anything that requires a hundred hours of training before the fun begins sounds more like psychological conditioning than entertainment.

As someone with a lot of hours into LoL I can tell you that these types of games take a lot of time to master, but they tend to be fun out of the gate. I like to think of them as all the fun of a MMORG boss or arena fight, but with only a 45 minute commitment to play.

I remember spending five months of my life playing DotA full time when I was younger. With two kids, a wife, and a job I'm not sure I have that luxury now. Unless of course I don't need to sleep ever again. Possible...

I played the beta, enjoyed it for awhile and got decent, then had a bad start to a game. (died twice, but after that went 30 and 0) My team decided in that 5 minutes that I was bad and intentionally losing, and down voted me immediately and I was punished with not being able to get experience for 24 hours because my team was filled with morons. Despite winning MVP for the game I was labeled as a "Feeder" for 24 hours and unable to level up or win rewards.

That is what you can expect from this game, a decently fun game with a community that is the worst gaming community I have ever seen.

800 hours since February is even more insane than my 1000 hours in 12 months.

Not sure whether or not Dota 2 is the best game I've ever played but if all my tombstone has on it is a list of my fave games, Dota will be right up there with Streetfighter II, Mario Kart and Alpha Centauri.

Interestingly the freemium angle I feel has been done right for the first time in any game. Simply put I WANT to give Valve my money for this game, and the cool customisation items I get are a bonus.

Because the map, courier, and pool of heroes is the same for every game played, a custom evil looking axe, suit of armour or something makes you look cooler when you're laying smackdown to some other player.

As with TF2 Valve provides a plentiful supply of this for free, and you can trade or swap to get complete sets. Even the most cynical of my friends seem pretty pleased when they get a rare item now, especially if it's for a hero they like.

I only wish the learning curve was a bit less steep, because it puts so many people off who I know would love this game. More strategy than anything I've ever played before.

I've been dabbling with it. I think the hardest part to balance is that if you let everyone have their favorite character some players can seem insanely good. But if you do a random pick half the team is useless. Picks make such a difference in the game that it is hard to balance them.

I've been playing Dota 2 for a few months and LoL for a few days, and there are a couple of things that are standing out:

The Dota shop has a terrible, terrible interface;

Crowd control in Dota is a lot more potent;

Timing attacks for last hits is a lot harder in Dota;

Having to buy heroes in LoL is really not that cool;

LoL is generally more polished than Dota 2 (which is to be expected).

I didn't find the LoL crowd less friendly to newbies than the Dota crowd.

If you are slightly patient in LoL, you can accumulate enough of the freebie points to buy characters and runes. Prices on the characters scale depending on how long they've been in the game. On the other hand they do a good job of rotating a variety of character types week to week so you can try people out and see which ones you might actually want to have on a more persistent basis. So that they aren't all entirely unlocked from the start isn't as much of an impediment as it might appear initially.

I feel almost compelled to make a long winded post but about DotA 2 but for the sake of people's time, I shall hold back. First off, I played DotA (original) back during its creation. This is a time when almost no one new about the game, I had helped test aspects of it before it became even a glimmer of what it is today. I had stopped after that and tried it again a few years later where I got my butt handed to me and rage quit. It lost all the fun value of playing when I was being bossed around and yelled at on IcCup (private server often used for competitive players). It lead me to quitting the game until quite some time later when the beta for DotA 2 had been released.

I had started playing the a bit after beta began and actually enjoyed it. You see, I use to play Starcraft competitively back in the day when it brought on such excitement and entertainment. I would train hours on end every day just to be much better then any average player (but still atrocious compared to pro-gamers in korea). There would be many nights when I would be awake at two or even four in-the-morning so I could watch proleague be placed live on korean tv. That level of excitement while cheering for my favorite player or team was almost a curse since after that, no other game could fill the void. That was until I started playing DotA 2 and watching tournaments such as the International.

To this day, the game (although hellishly difficult and with one of the highest learning curves of any video game out there) the game manages to give me that joy and excitement all over again. I think it was during The International 2 when I truly became engulfed in the game. I was cheering for Na'Vi, watching countless hours of matches and enjoying every bit of the game. Since World of Warcraft, I had not put money into another game often (aside from purchase) but for DotA 2 and for the teams, I have actually done that. To support the team, I bought a Na'Vi pennant which the proceeds goes to their team. This year, I bought The International 3 compendium to help increase the prize pool. The game does not force you to buy anything that actually affects the game (like heroes, runes, etc) but instead, it makes you want to spend money. Perhaps as with the Ugly Bad from the original Editor, I would add the increase desire to willingly throw money at this game.

Bare in mind this game is incredibly difficult and you will get frustrated. This game is for the thick-skinned. and those with patience. But here is the deal, the game is actually so much fun. You do not have to spend hundreds of hours to get to the point where you have fun, but you have to learn some of the basics. Beyond that, the game is incredibly fun with how you learn builds of skills and items, timings, or even get your first multiple kill. Or those moments when other team talks trash and "GG" early (thinking they won) only to have your team turn it around and win. The satisfaction of having an incredibly close game if hard to come by these days in the gaming world.

The other great part of the game are all the mechanics Valve has created. The ability to watch a match going on (like a friends match) where you can let the camera auto-pan wherever anything happens or even watch from player perspective where you can even see their mouse movements. This game is very enjoyable when playing with friends since you can do the weirdest builds (like a team of non-legged heroes) just for the sake of entertainment and still some how manage to win.

Well I failed miserably to have a short post but I am perhaps just too passionate about DotA 2. Anyway, I say give it a shot with a bunch of friends or solo. Go in realizing you will be terrible, atrocious and godawful but you will improve a lot. If you stick with it, you will eventually have a love/hate relationship with it. And sorry about the long post (even though I still had to hold back)

I had to register just to comment and say how well-written this article/review was. I've been playing Dota Allstars since TFT's release and AoS maps well before that and this was an excellent read. Cheers.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, for a new player simply looking at the UI of games like Dota 2 is like a non-pilot looking in the cockpit of an A380. You have no idea what any of the controls do or what the hell is even going on, never mind understanding how to play the game.

And then you're expected to do the equivalent of landing the plane in terrible weather without even an instruction manual in sight. All while the other pilots mock you over the radio as a noob and a feeder. It's just not an accessible game at all.

I've had beta access to this game ever since it was first announced and I've opened it maybe 3-4 times in those couple of years.

A game like DOTA has never been on my radar, I don't really like those kinds of games. However, I've played about 60 hours so far and I LOVE it. I suck, I'm overwhelmed, but after a few stiff drinks it good hilarious fun. Especially when you play with (very frequent) asshole players that drop "noob" "homo" and "f*g" insults when you shoot their faces off in chat the entire game. It's so much fun to be pretty bad at the game, through no fault of its own, and totally destroy people that call you names and call you "noobs" when you destroy their team because they want to go it alone rather than work as a team. Is the learning curve steep? It's practically vertical but that doesn't make it any less fun. Spreadsheet geeks will love the in-game store stats for what it does to your hero, but if you take 5 minutes to read what your character does and what items benefit them you can enjoy the game immensely. I'll never be a competitive player, but being a bit buzzed and working as a team is great fun. My only recommendation is to fill your team with people you know, otherwise it's just like Live with foul people trying to assert dominance through foul language and insults. Get together with some friends, sign onto Vent or something similar, drink a few stiff drinks and go to town. I've got like 5 invites left and I haven't had a friend yet that didn't enjoy it. We all know we'll never be competitive, but having a good game and winning aren't that rare. Just avoid people you don't know, there are more assholes than cool people playing, and you'll have a blast. Valve hit this one out of the park. It's great, it's free, it's enjoyable for those that aren't willing or can't to dedicate hours on hours of gameplay, and nothing they sell in the shop affects gameplay. It's nice to have a hugely fun game that you can't buy your way to a win. Sign up to play if you can, you'll lose nothing by getting a free game, and you might just enjoy it.

I've been in the beta since March 2012... and I've only played a whopping 20 matches (totaling 13 hours). I don't know how some of you guys do it - between work, school, and hanging out with friends, I barely have time for games anymore.

Dota 2 is a great game - I'm not the best player out there, I'm glad it's one of those games I can choose to sink as little (or as much!) time into it as I want. I play about two or three matches a month, if I have time.

I've been playing Dota 2 for a few months and LoL for a few days, and there are a couple of things that are standing out:

The Dota shop has a terrible, terrible interface;

Crowd control in Dota is a lot more potent;

Timing attacks for last hits is a lot harder in Dota;

Having to buy heroes in LoL is really not that cool;

LoL is generally more polished than Dota 2 (which is to be expected).

I didn't find the LoL crowd less friendly to newbies than the Dota crowd.

The fact that in Dota2 you need time your attacks accounting for the animation duration and direction your toon is facing, is probably what makes the gameplay that much different. I'd say LoL is more accessible to newbies just because of that. But yeah, the "community" in LoL is probably one of the worst things on the history of online gaming.

World of Warcraft had the hour (and daily) counter and that was depressing. Imagine playing from WoW beta (vanila) all the way to release of WotLK. I almost always avoided ever typing /played just because of depressing it can be.

LoL > DOTA2, I don't know how anyone can in their wild mind suggest the LoL community is worse the DOTA2 community. DOTA2 players will rage for DAYS at you, sometime the people will screw with you over steam for days. I have never seen this behavior from any other gave on Steam. I see nothing like this in LoL except for the occational bad apple in SoloQ - they get quickly reported and usually either improve or get banned.

Although I would strongly disagree with you (since to this day, my experience has been that LoL has one of the worst if not the worst communities out there), I would suggest being more careful with your wording. Just by the manner of posting you have chosen to go with, it can easily turn into an ARTS war which is not what I would like to see occur in this story.

When is the last time you encountered that behavior in Dota 2 keltor? I've never had anyone mess with me in Steam, despite running into bad apples on occassion. And honestly, the amount of ragers and jerks is incredibly low these days, if you already have some games established under your belt. Obviously you have to deal with lower match making tiers at first, where the unwashed masses exist. But stick with it for a few games, and before long you'll be surprised when after 50 games you come across a single asshat.

I'm not interested in starting a LoL vs Dota 2 flame ware either. My point is just that the game has come a long way through its beta, and by my own experience, the community has improved by leaps and bounds. While it's a competitive game and you will experience ragers (or become one briefly), overall, it's well policed, and you shouldn't let a small percentage affect your overall view of the game.

I've played both Dota 2 (and previously Dota) and LoL on and off. I enjoy the 3v3 mode of LoL better, but many of the heroes are boring (with some notable exceptions like Dr. Mundo). Dota 2 has some added complexity that is good, some added complexity that is meaningless. I'm really not sure which one I enjoy more. The playerbase of both is just as toxic on low levels as ever.